Peter Rodgers’s New Novel The Pelican and the Phoenix

Wondering what to get the text critic in your life for Christmas? Peter Rodgers has your answer. The third novel in his scribes series has just been published. From Peter:

I am writing to ask if you would alert people on the ETC blogspot to the publication of my new novel, Volume 3 in the scribes series. It is called The Pelican and the Phoenix, and it features the differences between the European Latin and the African Latin texts of the gospels. It also gives a portrait of Tertullian, a young pagan lawyer in Carthage, thinking his way toward Christian faith in 187-88 AD. The book is published by Amazon and is available as an e-book or as a paperback.

New Spanish Intro to NTTC by Juan Chapa

I have just learnt that my friend and colleague Juan Chapa Prado, professor of New Testament at the Facultad de Teología (Universidad de Navarra) and one of the editors of The Oxyrrhynchus Papyri has just published a new introduction to New Testament textual criticism in Spanish: La transmisión textual del Nuevo Testamento Manuscritos, variantes y autoridad, Biblioteca de Estudios Bíblicos, 163 (Salamanca: Ediciones Sigueme, 2021).

Since Chapa is a skilled papyrologist, there is excellent coverage of the material aspects and the earliest manuscripts on papyrus. Apart from the traditional topics in introductions to the field, Chapa discusses concepts like "initial text," "living text," "narrative textual criticism," canon, authority of scripture, regula fidei, the relationship to oral tradition and many other interesting topics.

Table of contents and introduction is available here.

The Goal of NTTC according to Eldon Epp

The second volume of Eldon J. Epp's collected essays and articles, Perspectives on New Testament Textual Criticism (covering 2006–2017) has just been published by Brill. Congratulations to the author who also turned 90 this year!

I have only browsed the volume, so for now I will just draw the attention to an introductory “notes for readers” which is freely accessible here, where Epp offers his own definition of the goal of New Testament Textual Criticism which he admits has varied, but as it stands now it is totally in line with my own view:

The Unitary Goal of New Testament Textual Criticism

New Testament textual criticism, employing aspects of both science and art, studies the transmission of the New Testament text and the manuscripts that facilitate its transmission, with the unitary goal (1) of establishing the earliest attainable text (which serves as a baseline), and at the same time (2) of assessing the textual variants that emerge from the baseline text so as to hear the narratives of early Christian thought and life that inhere in the array of meaningful variants.

Finally, I was also pleased to learn from the introduction “Developing Perspective” (accessible here) that Krister Stendahl from Sweden, then professor at Harvard University, gave the young doctoral student Epp the task to review a book on textual criticism by Fascher for the seminar and then with his other colleagues in the doctoral committee encouraged Epp to pursue a text-critical dissertation – well done! For another glimpse of Stendahl and a student at Harvard working on textual criticism in the 1950s, see here.

Festschrift for Maurice A. Robinson On-line

In 2014, Mark Billington and Peter Streitenberger edited a volume of essays, Digging for the Truth: Collected Essays Regarding the Byzantine Text of the Greek New Testament, to honor Maurice A. Robinson, Professor Emeritus of New Testament at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary (SEBTS).

One of the contributors to the volume, Abidan Paul Shah, former PhD student of Robinson, introduced the Festschrift at SEBTS and made available this videoclip of the presentation. At 4.20 you can see the honoree enter the stage to receive his book.

Since the book is now out of print, one of the editors, Peter Streitenberger, has now made it freely available here.

As readers will notice, the volume is written mainly from a pro-Byzantine text perspective, which is understandable since Robinson, in my opinion, is the most respected proponent of this school, which represent a very small minority of scholars in the discipline today. Read more about this perspective in Robinson’s own article, “The Case for Byzantine Priority,” in TC: A Journal of Biblical Textual Criticism.

Neverthelesss, it is a pity that there has not been another Festschrift for our co-blogger Maurice reflecting a wider perspective. I would have liked to contribute to that. On the other hand, I did participate in a symposium at SEBTS in 2014, invited by Maurice, to discuss the pericope adulterae, the text to which he has devoted much of his career (read my reports here and here with more links to summaries). The result of this consultation was published in The Pericope of the Adulteress in Contemporary Research, LNTS 551, ed. by D. A. Black and J. N. Cerone (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2016). See my announcement here.

Let me conclude this blogpost by citing from the preface of my recent book To Cast the First Stone (co-authored with Jennifer Knust) where I express my gratitude to Maurice as he reached out to a Swedish new-comer to the field:

Tommy would first like to thank Maurice Robinson, who was willing to suggest a topic for his bachelor’s thesis at Örebro School of Theology on a particularly interesting variant in the pericope adulterae, which led to his first research visit to the INTF in Münster and eventually resulted in his first academic publication [here]. In spite of different views regarding the history of the New Testament text, Maurice has always been gracious and helpful to both of us.

Text and Studies Series (Gorgias) Hosted by De Gruyter

Gorgias Press has entered a partnership with De Gruyter for the electronic hosting of the Texts and Studies volumes, which means that individual chapters are now available for each volume.

The chapters of “Early Readers, Scholars and Editors" (2014) and “Commentaries, Catenae and Biblical tradition” (2016) are available free of charge at:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/514331
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/514952

Chapters of  “Textual Variation: Theological and Social Tendencies” (2008), “Transmission and Reception” (2006) and “Studies in the Early Text” (1999 repr. 2013) are available for download at £23 each:
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/515397
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/516378
https://www.degruyter.com/viewbooktoc/product/515187

The most recent volume (“Liturgy and the Living Text”) will be available at a later stage.


(HT: Hugh Houghton)

The Future of New Testament Textual Scholarship (ed. G. V. Allen)

A new book is in the pipeline, to be published in December (or will it be available for the SBL in November?).  

The Future of New Testament Textual Scholarship: From H. C. Hoskier to the Editio Critica Maior and Beyond, edited by Garrick V. Allen (WUNT I).

Mohr-Siebeck’s description
This volume fundamentally re-examines textual approaches to the New Testament and its manuscripts in the age of digital editing and media. Using the eccentric work of Herman Charles Hoskier as a shared foundation for analysis, contributors examine the intellectual history of New Testament textual scholarship and the production of critical editions, identify many avenues for further research, and discuss the methods and protocols for producing the most recent set of editions of the New Testament: the Editio Critica Maior. Instead of comprising the minute re finement of a basically acceptable text, textual scholarship on the New Testament is a vibrant field that impinges upon New Testament Studies in unexpected and unacknowledged ways.

Contributors:
Garrick V. Allen, J. K. Elliott, Gregory Peter Fewster, Peter J. Gurry, Juan Hernández Jr., H. A. G.
Houghton, Annette Hüffmeier, Dirk Jongkind, Martin Karrer, Jennifer Wright Knust, Jan Krans, Thomas J. Kraus, Christina M. Kreinecker, Curt Niccum, D. C. Parker, Jacob Peterson, Stanley E. Porter, Catherine Smith, Jill Unkel, Klaus Wachtel, Tommy Wasserman, An-Ting Y

Approx. 540 pages
ISBN 9783161566622
cloth 145,00 €
ISBN 9783161566639
eBook PDF approx. 145,00 €

The book is the result of a wonderful conference organized by Garrick Allen (see here, here and here).